UbuWeb

An interview with Craig Dworkin

Note: Craig Dworkin, author of Parse (Atelos, 2008), No Medium (MIT Press, 2013), and founding senior editor of Eclipse sat down with me on July 21, 2015 for a conversation in Salt Lake City as part of the one on one podcast series.

Tan Lin's moving 'Echo'

One of the ways an experience of time is produced in poetic contexts requires engaging our body's memories, such as how we hear a sound. The way sound decays in a space, or how it moves and dimishes across a duration of time, engages our ability to take note of the unfurling present moment. It's a particular attention, fixated on a deeply embodied phenomenon that reinvigorates our ability to locate ourselves in the world. To invoke a sound is to invoke the body in present time.

I find this link between sound, the present, and the body richly explored by Tan Lin's digital poem, “Echo,” archived at UbuWeb. An echo reflects sound waves back to the listener, often in a diminished manner.

From Jersey City to Jesus

I first started to look at Erica Baum's art when she did her Card Catalogue series: close-up photographs of old library card catalogues that showed several of the card tabs imprinted or typewritten (and sometimes, for really old cards, handwritten) to indicate subject headings, categories, etc. Several of these photos show the catalogue drawer labels. My favorite of these is "Jersey City—Jesus." Anyway, that was 1997. Erica has done several interesting projects since then, all exploring the visual qualities of language as photographic subjects; words in the visual ambience, just there for the looking. Ubuweb has a pretty good collection of PDFs marking the progress of this art. Have a look.

“The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation.” — Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

The scopophilic selfie in the écriture transféminine of Juliana Huxtable's 'Mucous in my Pineal Gland — OR Universal croptops for all the self-cannonized saints of becoming, a screen4screen tribute

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters. Laura Jaramillo asserts that ASMR videos recreate a sensory and sensual materiality lost to the digital work-a-day world.

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters.

Thanks to Erik Redling and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek for organizing Beyond Metrical Prosody: New Rhythms in US and German (Post-) Modern Poetry at Freie Universitat in Berlin. The lively discussion underlined the value of this German/American exchange. I was grateful to learn more about the poetry and short lives of Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940–1975), as presented by Jan Röhnert, and Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–1954), presented by Agnes C. Müller. Brinkman translated O’Hara and Berrigan. Olson and Creeley wrote poems for Gerhardt (recordings on PennSound), the editor of FRAGMENTE, a prescient magazine that included them both: MP3 — Olson reading “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things …” in Berlin in 1966 and MP3: Creeley’s 1956 reading of “For Rainer Gerhardt.”

[N.B. To which she adds, in correspondence: “The elephant is a non-predatory mammal, a sensate being. The poem intersects body and spirit — elephant desire, with the function of marketing, production, distribution and exchange of elephant and rhino body parts by human predators.”]